them of having to consider the impacts of their decisions six months, or five years, down the line. Social workers know that the resources and supports the county provides are largely inadequate to address, in a substantial way, the challenges the families they work with face. Because they are unable to make substantial, systemic changes, they steel themselves for “frequent flyers,” children and parents whom they expect to return again and again to state custody and state scrutiny. In this sense, the actors present in this book are enmeshed in fraught relations of temporality and power.
A Note on Violence
The child welfare system does the important work of intervening in circumstances where children may be experiencing extreme forms of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. However, the vast majority of child welfare interventions in the United States involve concerns about neglect, often linked to conditions of poverty or to parental drug use. In the state of California in 2011, for example, 81.5 percent of children who entered foster care entered due to allegations of neglect, 9.8 percent for physical abuse, 2.4 percent for sexual abuse, and 6.3 percent for “other” reasons.9 The news media draw the public’s attention to foster cases that represent extreme, rather than typical, experiences of child abuse and of foster care. The cases I recount do not, in general, address the more extreme forms of violence and mistreatment from which child welfare services are tasked with protecting children. I avoid addressing these cases partly because they are the extreme minority of child welfare cases. Furthermore, my focus is on the discretionary processes and daily practices that constitute cases where the decision-making process is less clear, and where social workers, lawyers, and family members might be more likely to disagree about how to proceed. Regardless how categories of race, class, and citizenship might impact circumstances that are framed as instances of child abuse and neglect, it would be rare to question the decision to remove a child or to terminate parental rights in the face of extreme forms of violence. Cases that are unclear, and situations where one might imagine multiple possible outcomes, are cases that allow us to center the role of discretionary decision-making, and all the aspects that inform such a process. These, I suggest, are the richest sites for considering the way boundaries of citizenship, belonging, worthiness, race, and nation are produced through daily interactions between families and representatives of the state.
Boundaries of Belonging
As numerous scholars have noted (Dreby 2012; Chavez 2008; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003), immigration enforcement and ideas about “illegality” impact most, if not all, Latina/os in the United States, regardless of their citizenship status. The framework of the “illegal immigrant” collapses categories of race, nationality, and citizenship to draw distinctions between who does and who does not belong within the boundaries of the state. At this particular historical moment, concerns about illegality, deportation, citizenship, and rights are center stage in popular and political discourse. Increased media coverage of parental deportations and the separation of families with young children alongside growing criticism of the rise in deportations under the Obama administration have raised humanitarian concerns about the contemporary U.S. approach to immigration. And, as I discuss in Chapter 1, the 2014 influx and subsequent deportation of a large number of Central American unaccompanied minors raises complex concerns about protections for children and families, and the broader question of the extension, or denial, of basic rights to non-U.S. citizens. Critiques of birthright citizenship, brought into mainstream political debate by Senator Lindsay Graham, ask the American public to consider how U.S. citizens are “made” and whether place of birth or parentage should be the primary factor in determining membership, belonging, and rights. Debates surrounding the DREAM Act have questioned the worthiness and the culpability of those referred to as the “1.5 generation,” children born abroad who entered the United States without authorization, or who overstayed tourist visas, and have grown up attending U.S. schools, experiencing themselves as unquestionably American, although with severely restricted legal rights.10 Finally, 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump has garnered support for his candidacy through an immigration stance that includes banning all Muslims from legal entry to the United States, and building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Taken together, these issues highlight contemporary struggles over the boundaries of belonging, tensions between social and legal forms of citizenship, and rising (though not novel) trends in anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.
Numerous scholars have focused on the impacts of and responses to restrictive immigration policies on youth and families (Dreby 2010, 2015; Zayas 2015; Pallares 2015; Terrio 2015; Gonzales 2016, among others) and others have focused on the specific policies constraining immigrants’ lives at the “systemic level” (Zatz and Rodriguez 2015:10; see also Heidbrink 2014; Bhabha 2014). I focus on the enactment of the policies themselves in the context of child welfare interventions—how the everyday interactions and decisions of social workers, family members, and legal actors breathe life into the policies and laws that shape child welfare and immigration in the contemporary United States. It is through daily interactions that the delineations that draw lines between citizen and “other” come to impact the intimate lives of Latina/o families. As Boehm (2012:9) reminds us, “the overlapping spheres of state power and intimate lives cannot be separated.”
The ways in which ideologies of race, nation, and citizenship shape the expression of state power inform this book at a number of levels. At the most basic level, Latina/o parents who are in the U.S. without authorization are particularly vulnerable to the removal of their children through child welfare service intervention. As noted above, experiences of poverty, including presence in low-wage, unstable jobs, limited access to safe and affordable housing, and constrained ability to provide adequate childcare and medical care, are often translated into a language of “neglect.” These forms of structural violence, where racialization and structural inequality come together, produce circumstances that increase the tenuousness of Latina/o family formations as that language of “neglect” both mobilizes and justifies child welfare interventions.
Second, social workers, lawyers, and judges who are authorized to make custody recommendations and determinations, and to effect the removal, placement, and adoption of children, are far from immune to the way conceptions of “good” parents and “safe” homes are shaped by categories of race, class, nationality, and language use. As described in Chapter 4, these circumstances complicate the role of discretionary decision-making practices among social workers and legal actors, and create the space for discriminatory patterns to take shape despite social workers’ best intentions. And finally, the impacts of race, class, and citizenship categories take shape through the crossborder collaboration (or lack thereof) between social service agencies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. As such, I explore the complexities of institutional systems and bureaucratic practices that span the border region. The conditions of “interlegality” (Santos 1995), where individuals are caught up at the nexus of overlapping legal systems, are fraught as different state systems confront questions of citizenship, belonging, and rights in distinct ways.
At all levels, the impact of ideologies of race, nation, and citizenship are profoundly shaped by current trends in immigration policy and enforcement, and the politicization of the U.S.-Mexico border in the wake of 9–11. Much as Walters (2002:267) approaches deportation as “constitutive of citizenship,” I suggest that child welfare interventions into Latina/o families are constitutive of the production of the “good” family and, in turn, the “good” citizen. Importantly, the boundaries of belonging that are drawn throughout this book are not generally drawn under conditions of overt racism or explicit violence. Instead, I emphasize the ways the quotidian workings of the child welfare system serve as a site that illuminates how minute decisions ripple out to shape whole populations—primarily through gaps in institutional knowledge, discretionary decision-making, and processes of translation.
The child welfare system operates through categories such as “good” or “bad” parent, “stable” or “unstable” home, “abuser,”
